"A friendship founded on business is better than a business founded on friendship." (John D. Rockefeller, 1874-1960)

"An organization that is strong and stable and is ready to commit time, money, and patience will be more apt to reap rewards than the quick-hitting opportunist." (Richard Miller, Market Response International, The Direct Marketing Handbook)

"At Wabash, everybody sinks or swims together--everybody, even our salespeople. They aren't on commission. They participate in the same compensation system as everybody else." (Jerry Ehrlich, CEO of Wabash National)

"If a product isn't selling, I want to get it out of there because it's taking up space that can be devoted to another part of my line that moves. Besides, having a product languish on the shelves doesn't do much for our image." (Norman Melnick, chairman of Pentech International)

"On busy days in our telemarketing centers, I bring in buffet lunches, so people don't have to get up from their stations to go to lunch. But, I haven't yet gotten them to accept the catheter idea I proposed." (Jim McCann, CEO of 800-FLOWERS)

"One of the unique things we small companies have over the big guys is the ability to establish personal relationships. Big companies really can't do that. You read about effective organizations, learning organizations, lean and mean organizations, but small companies can be virtuous. We as small companies can have virtue because we as small companies are basically the embodiment of one or two people, and people can have virtue, while organizations really can't." (Jim Koch, founder of Boston Beer Company, maker of Sam Adams beer)

"Our philosophy has always been to compete with our competitors in their backyards. We feel that if we can compete effectively with Siemens in Germany, then surely we can compete with them in the United States or the rest of the world. But we have to wage battle on their home turf." (William W. George, President and CEO of Medtronic, Inc.)

"Quality, quality, quality: never waver from it, even when you don't see how you can afford to keep it up. When you compromise, you become a commodity and then you die." (Gary Hirshberg, founder of Stonyfield Farm Yogurt)

"Since the invention of the microprocessor, the cost of moving a byte of information around has fallen on the order of 10-million-fold. Never before in the human history has any product or service gotten 10 million times cheaper--much less in the course of a couple decades. That's as if a 747 plane, once at $150 million a piece, could now be bought for about the price of a large pizza." (Michael Rothschild, author of Bionomics, Economy as Ecosystem)

"The ability to 'listen in' on conversations about you or your competitors may represent one of the best market-research values of the Internet, simply because it's unique to the medium. I'm talking, of course, about the newsgroups and discussion groups so prevalent in the Usenet section of the Internet." (Susan Greco, articles editor, Inc. magazine)